A few months ago, a friend asked me to review her résumé.
She had submitted more than 300 job applications and was barely getting any responses.
I knew her work. She’s thoughtful, highly capable, and exactly the kind of engineer I’d jump at the chance to hire. So when she told me she wasn’t getting traction, I assumed the market was just rough.
Then I opened her résumé.
About halfway through, I had a very different reaction.
No wonder nobody is calling.
The bullet that changed my thinking
One line read:
Launched enterprise solution to a new acquisition channel.
My immediate thought was, “So what?”
Not because the work wasn’t important. Because I had no idea why it mattered.
- Was it successful?
- Did customers use it?
- Did it generate revenue?
- Was it a strategic initiative or a small experiment?
The bullet told me something happened. It didn’t tell me why I should care.
After we dug into the details, the real story emerged:
The launch resulted in 91% month-over-month subscriber growth and generated $1.2 million in annual recurring revenue by introducing subscriptions into the standard checkout flow.
The work hadn’t changed. Only the description changed.
The pattern I kept seeing
Over the years, I’ve reviewed hundreds of résumés, interviewed countless candidates, participated in promotion discussions, and coached engineers at every stage of their careers.
What happened with my friend wasn’t unusual.
I’ve seen the same thing play out in promotion reviews. A manager asks about a project and one engineer walks the room through the decisions they made, the tradeoffs they navigated, the risks they managed, and the outcomes they achieved. Another engineer worked on something equally important but describes it as a list of tasks.
Same level of contribution. Very different perception.
The gap isn’t always performance. The gap is often interpretation.
Organizations run on signals
Hiring managers don’t watch you solve difficult problems. Promotion committees don’t sit beside you during architectural decisions. Executives aren’t present for every hard conversation, difficult tradeoff, or critical project milestone.
They rely on artifacts:
- Résumés
- Performance reviews
- Project summaries
- Interview answers
- Self-assessments
Those artifacts become signals. And those signals shape decisions.
Activities vs. outcomes
Most people describe what they did. Very few describe what changed because they did it.
That’s a subtle distinction, but it’s an important one.
| What most people write | What actually lands |
|---|---|
| “Implemented subscription checkout flow.” | “Implemented subscription checkout flow, resulting in 91% subscriber growth and $1.2M in ARR.” |
| “Led infrastructure migration.” | “Led migration that cut deployment time by 60% and eliminated 3 hours of weekly manual work.” |
| “Partnered with design on redesign project.” | “Partnered with design on a checkout redesign that reduced drop-off by 22%.” |
The left column tells me work occurred. The right tells me the work mattered.
The pattern behind this is simple. Every strong accomplishment statement answers four questions: what was the situation, what were you responsible for, what did you actually do, and what changed as a result. That framework has a name, and it’s worth knowing — not because it’s a formula, but because it forces you to think about outcomes before you start writing.
Ironically, the people most likely to default to the left column are often the strongest contributors. They don’t want to sound arrogant. They don’t want to take too much credit. They assume the value is obvious.
It usually isn’t. People can’t evaluate what they can’t see.
This isn’t about self-promotion
At this point, some people assume I’m advocating for better self-promotion. I’m not.
I’ve seen that problem too. Every performance review season there are self-assessments filled with words like “spearheaded,” “transformed,” and “led.” The accomplishments sound enormous. Then you start pulling on the thread.
The ownership doesn’t match the description. The impact is unclear. The scope feels inflated.
And once credibility starts to erode, every other claim receives more scrutiny.
Understating your contributions creates a gap between reality and perception. Overstating your contributions creates a gap between reality and perception too.
The most effective communicators aren’t manufacturing credibility. They’re making reality easier to see.
Two questions that matter most
After years of hiring, mentoring, and evaluating engineers, I’ve come to believe that most career signals eventually roll up into two questions:
Did you own it?
Did it matter?
Ownership matters because organizations need people willing to make decisions and accept accountability for the outcomes. Impact matters because activity alone doesn’t move a business forward.
This feels especially important right now. As AI becomes more capable, the value of producing more activity continues to decline. Accelerate made the case years ago that high-performing teams are defined by measurable outcomes, not activity volume. AI doesn’t change that argument. It just makes the stakes higher.
Less:
- describing effort without outcomes
- listing tasks instead of decisions
- assuming the value speaks for itself
More:
- explaining what changed because of your work
- connecting your decisions to business outcomes
- making your judgment visible — not just your output
Those are much harder skills to automate.
Where this is going
I kept seeing the same pattern show up everywhere. Not just in hiring. Not just in promotions. In how organizations interpret leadership, in how teams communicate progress, in how engineers describe the decisions they make every day.
People were constantly sending signals without realizing it. Sometimes through what they said. Sometimes through what they didn’t say.
That’s where the idea for Invisible Signals™ came from.
At its core, an invisible signal is what someone else perceives from what you say — or don’t say. The signal isn’t your intention. It’s the conclusion someone else reaches after hearing your story.
When ownership is missing, people infer participation. When outcomes are missing, people infer limited impact. When context is missing, people fill in the blanks themselves.
The difference between being overlooked and being recognized isn’t always capability. It’s visibility.
If this resonated, Invisible Signals™ is where I explore these ideas further — one pattern at a time.
